Infrastructure Management Software Blog : event management

Consolidated IT event management: five requirements for greater efficiency (free white paper)

pspielvogel — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:47:00 GMT

We just released a new white paper called “Consolidated IT event management: five requirements for greater efficiency.” It talks about the challenges of managing IT with severely constrained budgets and how to make better use of your existing resources.

The main premise is to create a centralized Operations Bridge to consolidate and correlate events from across your entire enterprise. The paper provides five key requirements for using the Operations Bridge to drive cost-effective IT operations.

You can download the paper now using the "Attachment" link below.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

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Innovation Week Part 1 - Operations Manager on UNIX 9.0

pspielvogel — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:45:00 GMT

Over the past few weeks, I have been involved in many conversations with both customers and colleagues about innovation. So, I wanted to highlight several new products that demonstrate how managing IT operations continues to evolve (contrary to some opinions).

First, I’ll start with the foundation - a consolidated event console that is the main tool for the operations bridge staff. HP released OMU 9.0 last month. As with all our event management consoles, this does not force our customers to rip and replace. OMU gives companies the ability to reduce the cost of managing their increasingly complex IT environments by consolidating events into a central console.

Some of the enhancements include:

A new Web-based Administration UI that allows multiple administrators to perform tasks in parallel, boosting productivity.
Enhanced agentless monitoring by incorporating SiteScope events into the Operations Manager console and service map, giving organizations alternate ways to broaden infrastructure coverage and reduce the cost of monitoring.
More flexibility in managing network events using NNMi.

Next week, I will post a podcast with 10 reasons to upgrade to OMU 9.0.

For Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

Free Webinar: 5 Tips to Reduce Incident Resolution Costs

pspielvogel — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:22:00 GMT

On Tuesday July 28, I will be participating in an EMA webinar with researcher and Vice President Dennis Drogseth. The official title “What is New in the Not-so-New Area of Event Management: Five Tips to Reduce Incident Resolution Costs” is very telling. Many people believe that there is nothing new in managing IT infrastructure. The reality is that some of HP’s biggest R&D investments have been in this area.

Displaying disparate events may not be rocket science, but correlating events from different IT domains to determine which is the cause and which are the symptoms certainly is. This is exactly the premise of OMi, which uses topology-based event correlation (TBEC) to consolidate event storms into actionable information.

Here’s the webinar abstract:

Event management may not be the next new thing but it is quietly making dramatic advances that can save your company both time and money. These new approaches rely on understanding up-to-date service dependencies to accelerate problem resolution.

During the 45 minute webinar, we will answer the following questions.

Why should you reconsider your event and performance management strategy?
What is the impact of ITIL v3 and the concept of an operations bridge on your people, processes, and tools?
What innovations can help you more cost-effectively manage events?

We will also leave time at the end to address your questions.

For Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

Software Universe - Initiatives that Deliver Rapid ROI

pspielvogel — Fri, 15 May 2009 18:51:00 GMT

I just learned that I will be presenting two sessions at Software Universe, which runs from June 16-18 in Las Vegas. The overall theme of the conference is “focusing on initiatives that can deliver immediate improvements and rapid ROI.” Both of my talks fit squarely within that charter.

Here are the two topics on which I will be speaking.

Automating operations management with HP Operations Orchestration
My colleague, Ralph Capasso, an expert in runbook automation, will be co-presenting the talk and running a live demo.

Abstract:
As your infrastructure becomes more complex, you’ll experience more IT events—many of them symptoms of the same root cause. And you probably have limited staff resources to manage and route incidents. The solution? Consolidation and automation. We’ll tell you how to automate event management and remediation with HP Operations Orchestration. Using case studies and workflow examples, we’ll show you how a typical enterprise can drive out millions of dollars in costs, and we’ll present a live demonstration of how HP Operations Manager and Operations Orchestration work together to resolve common issues.

Leveraging agent-based and agentless monitoring to drive down TCO
I’m presenting this session with Alex Ryals of Pepperweed. He has extensive field experience implementing complex IT solutions.

Abstract:
In today’s economy, a mixture of agent-based and agent-less monitoring techniques can be the key to effective infrastructure monitoring within tight budget constraints. Attend this session and learn how two customers combined HP Operations Manager agent-based techniques and HP SiteScope agent-less technologies to reduce their TOC while optimizing their infrastructure monitoring. Presenters will take a deep dive into the integration of these two HP solutions and will explain how you can create both IT value and business value. You’ll also hear how Operations Manager and SiteScope integrate into the overall HP BTO portfolio.

If you have any topics you would like us to cover in our talks, or questions on these topics you want answered, please leave a comment on the blog or contact me directly.

In a future post, I’ll have speakers from other sessions preview their topics.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

A New Puppy, IT Operations and the Economy

pspielvogel — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 21:43:00 GMT

My family and I picked up a new Brittany puppy this past Thursday with mass excitement mixed with some degree of uncertainty. Yeah, I know what you are thinking: What were you thinking? We took a stable situation and introduced something new and exciting in the hope of improving the overall environment.

With the economy tsunami we are in, it may not the best time to expand a family from 4 to 5. The weeks prior to picking up Clancy were spent reading various puppy care books from our local library to ensure we were ready. I was expecting to find a single “how to” book/manual but each writer had a little different advice and perspective. I suspect the variety of opinions might be similar to the numerous bosses you have had in your IT Operations career.

My family is making sacrifices to improve our quality of life by adding Clancy. Any spare time we had before is now consumed by the usually duties of feeding, walking, and picking up after him. One significant change I anticipate for my kids is as nothing can be left on the floor. Before the puppy came home it was ok to leave something out if you are going to use it again. My kids probably took this liberty for granted. I suspect this eye-opening adjustment to strategically placed toys is similar to the shock IT Operations teams face today learning that their standard allocation of budget to keep the lights on will probably shrink significantly this year.

Prior to the downturn in the economy it was standard practice for a company to spend 70% of its IT budget “keeping the lights on”. Was 70% the right amount to allocate? Should it remain the same to avoid impacting service levels? I am afraid I do not have an answer to this question nor do I believe many IT Operations Managers know for sure. I do not claim to have magic pixie dust, no book or manual of running IT operations in the year 2009-2010.

What I can tell you from a recent market study is that many IT organizations buy Performance and Availability monitoring tools along with an Event Management system with good intentions. They plan to “centralize event processing” at an Operations Bridge inside their organization but for various reasons never quite get there.

The study revealed that most companies have more than one event console in their IT Organization and provides an opportunity to reduce CAPEX and OPEX by streamlining their IT Operations process and tool sets. Now given the fact most IT budgets will be cut, is this the time to change your environment to a centralized console for event management? It worked for HP, but we need to eat our own dog food.

Are you willing to take the leap and endure some short term discomfort to permanently lower your IT cost structure?

For Operations Center, Dennis Corning.